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About the Office of Scale Research
The Office of Scale Research (OSR) was created within the Department of Marketing at Southern Illinois University by Dr. Gordon C. Bruner II and Dr. Paul J. Hensel in the late 1980s. The office was very helpful in the development of the early volumes of the Marketing Scales Handbook series. Volume 1 was published by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in 1992 and was the first collection of marketing-related measurement scales ever published. Volume 2 was released in 1996 (AMA), the third volume came out in 2001 (AMA), and Volume 4 was released in 2005 (jointly published by AMA and Thomson).
After that, changes in authors and publishers almost led to the end of the series. Eventually, Dr. Bruner continued the work on his own. Volumes 5 and 6 were published in the next few years but the fate of the series was threatened again when Dr. Bruner retired from academia. Ultimately, he decided to continue working on the series which lead to the publication of several more volumes. (More about the books can be found at this site.)
This OSR website provides assistance to scholars, students, and others by showing what scales have been developed already so researchers do not have to go to the effort and expense of developing new measures from scratch. The tables of contents for each volume of the Marketing Scales Handbook are available. A reading list is provided for those who are interested in furthering their understanding of scale construction and validation. Likewise, the links page is useful in identifying other sources of scale-related information. A few technical reports are provided that deal with various scaling issues. Finally, after 30+ years of gathering and critcally reviewing scales, Dr. Bruner has been in a unique position to comment on scale-related issues. That and other information is on the News page.